ility of a true science of society. Scholars were
studying and writing upon other sciences that are related to
sociology--biology, history, economics, and politics. Scientific
information about the various races of mankind was accumulating. At
length Auguste Comte, a Frenchman, found a place for sociology among
the sciences and declared it to be the highest of them all. In 1842 he
completed the publication of the _Positive Philosophy_, in which he
maintained that human society is an organism similar to biological
organisms, and that its activities can be systematized and
generalizations be deduced therefrom for the formation of a true
science. In his _Descriptive Sociology_ and later works Herbert
Spencer in England amplified the theory of Comte and arranged a mass
of facts as evidence of its truth. He put too much emphasis on
biological resemblances in the opinion of present-day sociologists,
but his emphasis on inductive study and his generalizations from
biology were important contributions to the development of the new
science.

388. =Psychological Sociologists.=--Comte and Spencer were followed by
other biological sociologists whose names are well known to students
of the science. Interest was aroused in Great Britain, on the
continent of Europe, and in America. Students were influenced by
conclusions that were being reached in biology, in economics, and in
other allied departments of thought, but the one science which became
most prominent to the minds of sociologists was psychology. Ward's
_Dynamic Sociology_, published in 1883, marked an epoch, because it
called special attention to the psychic factors that enter into social
life. After him it became increasingly clear that the true social
forces were psychic, though physical conditions affected social
progress. A younger school of sociologists has come into existence,
and the science is being developed on that basis. More than one
individual thinker has made his special contribution, and there is
still a variety of opinion on details, but the general principles of
the science are being worked out in substantial agreement. It is not
to be expected that such a complex and comprehensive science could be
completed in its short history of approximately half a century, or
that it can ever be made exact, like mathematics or the natural
sciences, but there is every reason to expect the development of a
body of classified facts that will be of inestimable value in
att